A novel approach to understanding Parkinsonian cognitive decline using minimum spanning trees, edge cutting, and magnetoencephalography

Graph theory-based approaches are efficient tools for detecting clustering and group-wise differences in high-dimensional data across a wide range of fields, such as gene expression analysis and neural connectivity. Here, we examine data from a cross-sectional, resting-state magnetoencephalography study of 89 Parkinson’s disease patients, and use minimum-spanning tree (MST) methods to relate severity of Parkinsonian cognitive impairment to neural connectivity changes. In particular, we implement the two-sample multivariate-runs test of Friedman and Rafsky (Ann Stat 7(4):697–717, 1979) and find it to be a powerful paradigm for distinguishing highly significant deviations from the null distribution in high-dimensional data. We also generalize this test for use with greater than two classes, and show its ability to localize significance to particular sub-classes. We observe multiple indications of altered connectivity in Parkinsonian dementia that may be of future use in diagnosis and prediction.